Humboldt University of Berlin

Based on Wikipedia: Humboldt University of Berlin

The University That Taught the World How Universities Should Work

Fifty-seven Nobel Prize winners. That's more than any other German university has ever produced. But the truly remarkable thing about Humboldt University of Berlin isn't its collection of laureates—it's that this institution, founded in 1810, essentially invented the modern research university. Every major university you can name, from Johns Hopkins to Oxford's research programs, borrowed its blueprint from this single school on Berlin's grandest boulevard.

The list of people who walked its halls reads less like an alumni directory and more like a roll call of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most consequential minds: Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto von Bismarck, the Brothers Grimm. The physicist who discovered quantum theory. The revolutionaries who wrote the Communist Manifesto. The man who unified Germany. The scholars who collected fairy tales that have been told to children for two hundred years since.

How did one university attract so much genius? And what happened to it when that genius was scattered by fascism and then frozen in place by the Cold War?

A Palace Becomes a Temple of Work

The story begins with Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806. The Prussian state was humiliated, its territories carved up, its army shattered. In response, a group of reformers decided that if Prussia couldn't compete with France militarily, it would have to compete intellectually. Among these reformers was Wilhelm von Humboldt, a philosopher and linguist who believed something radical for his time: that research and teaching should happen together, conducted by the same people, in the same institution.

This might seem obvious now. It wasn't then.

Before Humboldt, European universities were primarily teaching institutions. Professors lectured from established texts. Original research, when it happened, happened elsewhere—in royal academies, private laboratories, or the studies of wealthy gentlemen scholars. Humboldt's vision was different. He argued that students should learn not by passively receiving established knowledge but by participating in its creation. Professors should be active researchers. The university should be a place where new knowledge was made, not just where old knowledge was transmitted.

King Friedrich Wilhelm III approved the plan on August 16, 1809. For a building, the new university received an elegant Baroque palace that had belonged to Prince Henry, the younger brother of Frederick the Great. The prince had died, his widow and her ninety-person household had moved out, and the building stood empty. It sits on Unter den Linden—literally "Under the Linden Trees"—the grand boulevard that runs through central Berlin, across from the royal palace itself.

Humboldt himself didn't stick around to see his creation open. He faced enormous resistance to his ideas, submitted his resignation to the king in April 1810, and was gone by the time the first 256 students arrived that October. The school would bear his family name eventually, but not for another 139 years.

The Intellectual Bodyguard

One of the first students, Ludwig Feuerbach (who would later influence Marx's thinking about religion), captured the atmosphere in 1826:

"There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings; in no other university can you find such a passion for work, such an interest for things that are not petty student intrigues, such an inclination for the sciences, such calm and such silence. Compared to this temple of work, the other universities appear like public houses."

This was not a party school.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the university expanded relentlessly. It absorbed the Charité hospital, which had started life in 1710 as a quarantine house for plague victims outside the city gates. It accumulated natural history collections so vast that by 1889 they required their own building—now the Museum für Naturkunde, home of the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. It founded the first academic chair in history anywhere. It became, in the words of physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern"—the Prussian royal family.

The chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann worked there. So did the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who formulated the law of conservation of energy and made foundational contributions to the study of vision and hearing. The mathematicians Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass advanced number theory and the rigorous foundations of calculus. Rudolf Virchow, the father of modern pathology, taught there. Robert Koch, who identified the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax, conducted his research in Berlin's laboratories.

By the late nineteenth century, Berlin was the center of world science. If you wanted to do serious research in physics, chemistry, or medicine, you went to Germany. And if you went to Germany, you very likely went to Berlin.

The Humboldtian Model Goes Global

Other countries noticed. When Johns Hopkins University opened in Baltimore in 1876, it explicitly modeled itself on the German research university. Hopkins was America's first true research university, and it spawned imitators: Chicago, Stanford, the transformation of Harvard and Yale from gentlemen's colleges into research powerhouses. The German PhD became the gold standard worldwide. The seminar format, where students and professors discuss texts and research together rather than simply listening to lectures, spread everywhere.

The core Humboldtian principle—that teaching and research belong together—became so widely accepted that we forget it was ever controversial. Today, professors at research universities are expected to publish original work. Graduate students are trained by participating in active research projects. Undergraduates write theses. All of this traces back to early nineteenth-century Berlin.

Even the physical structure of modern universities often echoes Humboldt's vision. The departmental organization, the research library at the center of campus, the laboratories clustered by discipline—these patterns emerged from the German model and spread worldwide.

An International Crossroads

The university didn't just attract Germans. In the 1890s, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American scholar and civil rights pioneer, spent two years in Berlin. He was studying history and economics, but he was also experiencing something he'd never encountered in the United States: a society where his race didn't determine his treatment. "I found to my gratification," he later wrote, "that they did not regard me as a curiosity or something sub-human." He returned to America with a PhD from Harvard, but his intellectual formation was deeply shaped by Berlin.

Ivan Turgenev, the great Russian novelist, studied there. So did Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist whose work on the arbitrary relationship between words and their meanings founded modern linguistics and influenced everything from anthropology to literary theory. Robert Schuman, who would later be one of the founding architects of the European Union, earned his law degree in Berlin.

The university even ran an Oriental Seminary from 1887 onward, training colonial administrators and missionaries in Asian and African languages. It was part of Germany's imperial ambitions—the school was founded specifically to prepare officials for service in Cameroon, then a German colony—but it also became a genuine center for the study of non-European languages and cultures.

The Bonfire in the Square

Then came 1933.

The Nazi seizure of power transformed every German institution, and the universities were no exception. Within a year, 250 Jewish professors and employees were fired from Berlin's university. Countless doctoral degrees were revoked. Nearly one-third of the entire staff was purged. Students and scholars suspected of opposing the regime were expelled and often arrested.

On May 10, 1933, something happened in the square directly across from the university's main building. Students, organized by the Nazi German Student Union and protected by the Sturmabteilung (the SA, or "Brownshirts"), built an enormous bonfire. They burned approximately 20,000 books pulled from the university's library—works by Jewish authors, political opponents, anyone deemed "degenerate" by the regime.

Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, gave a speech.

Today, a memorial stands in the center of that square, now called Bebelplatz. It's by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman. If you look down through a glass panel set into the pavement, you see a white underground room lined with empty bookshelves—space for exactly 20,000 volumes. A bronze plaque nearby bears words written by Heinrich Heine, the great German-Jewish poet who had studied at the university more than a century earlier:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

"This was but a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people."

Heine wrote that line in 1820. He was thinking about the Spanish Inquisition. He couldn't have known how precisely his words would apply to his own country, his own university, more than a hundred years later.

Cold War Division

The war ended. The university's buildings, damaged by Allied bombing, were rebuilt. But Berlin itself was divided, and the university found itself in the Soviet sector—East Berlin.

The Soviets reopened the school in 1946, but they immediately began suppressing academic freedom. Lectures had to be submitted for approval by Communist Party officials. Soviet propaganda played through speakers in the cafeteria. Liberal and social democratic students faced persecution.

In March 1947, the NKVD—the Soviet secret police—arrested a group of students. They were accused of forming a "resistance movement" and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor. Between 1945 and 1948, at least eighteen students and teachers were arrested or abducted. Some disappeared for weeks. Some were taken to the Soviet Union and executed.

Many of those targeted had been active in resistance to the Nazi regime. Now they found themselves resisting another dictatorship.

The German Communist Party had long considered social democrats to be their primary enemies—more dangerous, in some ways, than fascists, because they offered a competing vision of the left. This hostility dated back to the chaotic early years of the Weimar Republic and persisted through the Soviet occupation. Students who had risked their lives opposing Hitler were now being imprisoned for opposing Stalin.

In 1948, during the Berlin Blockade (when the Soviets cut off all ground access to West Berlin), a new university was founded in the western sector: the Freie Universität Berlin, the Free University. The name was pointed. "Free" referred to West Berlin's self-image as part of the democratic world, in contrast to the "unfree" communist east. The new school drew faculty and traditions from the old Friedrich Wilhelm University, positioning itself as the legitimate heir to the Humboldtian legacy.

Meanwhile, in the east, Soviet authorities wanted to rename the occupied university after a communist leader. University administrators managed to deflect this by proposing a different name: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, honoring both Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother Alexander, the famous naturalist and explorer. The Humboldt name was prestigious enough to be acceptable to the Soviets and uncontroversial enough to be acceptable to the West. It stuck.

Two Universities, One Legacy

For four decades, Berlin had two major universities, each claiming descent from the same institution. The Free University, in the west, became a major research center, attracting international scholars and substantial funding from the United States and West German governments. Humboldt University, in the east, remained under Communist Party control, its curriculum shaped by Marxist-Leninist ideology, its connections increasingly oriented toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The situation was unique in the world. No other city had two such institutions, born from the same parent, divided by ideology and a wall.

Then, in 1989, the Wall came down.

Reunification and Reconstruction

German reunification brought another upheaval. Humboldt University was radically restructured under what were called Structure and Appointment Commissions, led by West German professors. The approach was unsparing. For departments in the social sciences and humanities—fields where East German scholarship had been most shaped by communist ideology—the entire faculty underwent what was officially called "liquidation." Existing contracts were terminated. Positions were opened for new applicants.

In practice, this meant that West German academics largely replaced East German ones. Older professors were pushed into early retirement. The East German higher education system had included many more permanent mid-level positions—assistant professors, lecturers, researchers—than the West German system allowed. These positions were abolished or converted to temporary contracts. By 1998, only ten percent of the mid-level academics who had worked at Humboldt before reunification still had positions there.

It was a purge of a different kind than the ones that came before—not based on race or political resistance, but on association with a defunct system. Whether it was necessary, whether it was just, whether it threw out valuable scholarship along with ideological baggage, remains debated.

What did survive were the university's research relationships with Eastern European institutions. Through all the restructuring, these links were maintained, providing continuity that other East German institutions often lost.

The University Today

Modern Humboldt University sprawls across three campuses. The historic main building still stands on Unter den Linden, its Baroque facade restored after wartime damage, now housing humanities, law, and economics. A northern campus near Berlin's massive new central train station hosts the life sciences and medicine, including the Charité hospital. A newer southeastern campus at Adlershof—built on the site of a former East German research center—houses the natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics.

About 35,000 students study there, including more than 4,600 from abroad. The university offers degrees in 171 different disciplines. It shares its medical school with its old Cold War rival, the Free University—a reunion of sorts, though the two institutions remain separate.

The book sale still happens at the gates facing Bebelplatz, where the books were burned.

What Remains

Humboldt University's story contains nearly every current of modern European history: Enlightenment optimism, nationalist ambition, scientific triumph, antisemitic horror, Cold War division, and the messy compromises of reunification. It produced revolutionaries and reactionaries, Nobel laureates and war criminals, poets and propagandists.

But its most lasting contribution may be the idea that animates research universities worldwide: that teaching and research belong together, that students learn best by participating in the creation of knowledge, that a university should be not a museum of established facts but a workshop for new ones. This was Wilhelm von Humboldt's vision in 1809, proposed to a defeated kingdom looking for ways to rebuild its strength.

The kingdom is gone. The ideas remain, scattered across every continent, in every serious university. The intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns became the template for global higher education. And the palace on Unter den Linden, where princes once held court, still fills each semester with students who don't know—or perhaps don't care—that they're walking halls where Einstein once walked, where Marx once studied, where books once burned.

The temple of work endures.